Fiction Reboot

A couple of weeks ago I answered a few interview questions from novelist/academic researcher/teacher Brandy Schillace, and the results are now online. I spouted stuff like:

"Through my teens I read classic science fiction and ’60s British thriller writers. Then I had the advantage of a very solid three years of education in English Literature that opened up new avenues to me, from the medieval mindset to the poetry of Thomas Hardy. I think the point is that as a reader I had a big, big net, and a special fascination with popular fiction. I can remember buying Westerns and Romance novels, neither of which were of particular interest to me but I felt driven to find out what was going on in that kind of writing. I looked at William Goldman and Michael Crichton and saw that it was possible to be both a novelist and a screenwriter; Goldman kept the distinction clear and Crichton’s later, less substantial work showed what can happen when you don’t, so I learned from both of them."

and

"Research is nothing more than expanded observation and as such, it’s key to all creation. Art’s about insight, and you can’t offer insight into nothing. Research is about continuing to write with authority after you’ve detected the limits of what you know."

More dazzling autobiography and Secrets of the Universe here.

And while you're visiting, dig around a little. Dr Schillace's interest in the intersection of science, medicine and literature give her obsessions and researches an inevitably Gothic tint. Her published academic work covers areas of psychology, neurology, weird science and reproduction; here's a podcast recorded in the Wellcome Collection's club room, in which she discusses recent work on syphilis and Dracula, while if your imagination isn't piqued by her search across Europe for the Labour Device, an eighteenth-century "mechanical phantom used in the teaching of male midwives", then I don't know what would do it.

Stephen Laws

My good friend, fellow-writer, and fearless reprobate Stephen Laws has joined the blogosphere. You can follow him here, or by going to www.stephenlaws.com.

Tell him that I sent you. And that I'd labelled him 'odd stuff'.

Science and Sensation

I love this. Under the headline, Experts Warn Over Humanising Apes, the Associated Press has put out a lengthy science piece which has been picked up by, among others, The Independent - in fact it's being reprinted everywhere, from Pravda to The York Advertiser. It begins

Action is needed now to prevent nightmarish "Planet Of The Apes" science ever turning from fiction to fact, according to a group of eminent experts.
Their report calls for a new rules to supervise sensitive research that involves humanising animals.
One area of concern is "Category Three" experiments which may raise "very strong ethical concerns" and should be banned.
An example given is the creation of primates with distinctly human characteristics, such as speech.

A tip of the hat to Chernin Entertainment and Twentieth Century Fox, for happening to launch their advance publicity for Rise of the Planet of the Apes in the very week that the story breaks... what are the chances, eh?

Here's how we did it in 1991.


I know for sure that this kind of sensationalism is an irritant to many working scientists, though maybe not to the extent that you'd think. Apparently there's an entire generation of computer designers inspired to their choice of career by 2001's murderous HAL 9000. How many people working in gene science today had their imaginations fired by the mayhem in Jurassic Park? And I know from my own experience that it's never hard to find a scientist ready to share a beer and speculate in the aid of some extreme worst-case scenario in their chosen field.

(Would that more producers would take advantage of this, instead of regarding such due diligence as, as one critical of my method put it to me, 'letting the tail wag the dog'.)

Science and sensation will always go together, not least because science can be pretty sensational in its own right. But there's more involved than simple awe and the contemplation of wonder; science is our age's way of connecting with myth, with those eternal patterns of human behaviour writ large and lurid in tales designed to captivate.

The coverage inspired by Chimera was, to put it mildly, highly speculative. Not that we didn't encourage it. But nor, in interview, did I ever try to blur the line between actual science and the concerns of the fiction we'd based on it. When the novel first came out I met with John Burke Davies, a reporter from The News of the World, whose editor had sent him to investigate or expose this charlatan who claimed to have inside information on the whereabouts of man-made monsters. Once it was established that I was claiming no such thing, our meeting turned into an eighteen-hour pub crawl around the journalistic haunts of Manchester. I remember drinking with sharply-dressed Sun reporters in a bar panelled with timber salvaged from an R101 airship. But that's all I remember.

The 'eminent experts' quoted in the AP release include Sir Paul Nurse, whose encouragement toward the creation of a pro-science show set me on the path to Eleventh Hour. As far as I can tell from the selected quotes, most of them are talking about the hazards and ethical issues of modifying gene functions at the cellular level, which is where the real science is at.

Dare I suggest that the raising of ape armies and the overthrow of mankind is best left to those of us who deal in that kind of thing.



Now available with added Andy Serkis.

Saturday Event

On Saturday I'm giving a talk-with-clips about my TV career at the Lass O'Gowrie on Charles Street in Manchester, and as the day gets closer I'm growing convinced that no one is going to turn up. If you've an events diary or similar feature and might be interested in giving it a mention, feel free to pass the information on.

I was born in Salford so this is a homecoming for me. I'll be covering ground from my start with Doctor Who through working with Brian Clemens on BUGS in the 90s with side-trips into TV horror and Rosemary & Thyme, right up to the experience of remaking Eleventh Hour in Hollywood for Jerry Bruckheimer (the first version, with Patrick Stewart, was shot in Manchester).

The talk's in an upstairs room of the Lass at 6.30, right after my old friend Bryan Talbot speaking about his Grandville graphic novels. It follows a day of events with Johnny Vegas, who I suspect will have no trouble pulling an audience.

'Sizzling Summer Reads' Promotion

It's with some irony that I'm writing this as the rain hammers hard on the skylight above my head... but the Top Suspense Group, of which I'm a member, is running a day-to-day Summer Reads promotion and yesterday was my day in the sun.

Titles featured so far include Lee Goldberg's Watch me Die, Vicki Hendricks' Voluntary Madness, and Naomi Hirahara's Summer of the Big Bachi. There'll be a new title featured more or less daily until the end of the month.

So if this rain continues, you can always stay in and read a book. With my salesman's hat on, here's what I wrote for the Group's blog.

I was within two blocks' drive of Paradise when the call came over the air. It was a 927, a general code meaning to investigate unknown trouble. The dispatch girl was offering it to Travis and Leonard, both of whom were checking IDs for warrants in the scrubby little park around the Adult Center on Jefferson; knowing that I could have them as backup in three minutes or less if the 'unknown trouble' turned out to be something bigger than anticipated, I cut in and took the call. Squad Sergeant responding, one minute or less.

Valley of Lights is a fusion of crime and horror, a dance between predator and prey in which the story twists, the stakes increase, and the tables are repeatedly turned.

It grew out of time that I spent in Phoenix, Arizona, researching the city and the desert and going on ride-alongs with the Phoenix PD. I was working on a novel that I never actually got to write. That novel idea was ambitious and sprawling. It was everything I ever wanted to say. It was art. It would have been as boring as hell. Instead, I wrote this.

It began as a simple idea for a short story and grew as I wrote it, in the way that no book had ever grown in my hands before. The story flew. All those days in the squad car with Lieutenant Dave Michels, the late shifts with Sergeants Tom Kosen and Jesse James, the flophouses and the trailer parks and the stakeouts in gaudy motels and the millionaires' houses in the Camelback Mountains - everything came together to feed the tale.

This is the book of which Dean Koontz wrote, "If thriller reading were a sin, Stephen Gallagher would be responsible for my ultimate damnation. His work is fast-paced, well-written, infused with a sense of dark wonder, and altogether fresh."

When I selected the title to present as my Sizzling Summer Read, fellow Top-Suspenser Ed Gorman kindly wrote, "I still think that Valley of Lights is one of the coolest - and most imitated - novels I've ever read."

Here's what Phoenix PD Sergeant Alex Volchak finds on his arrival at the Paradise Motel:

We came to the last of the units. Beyond this was some empty parking space and then a high cinderblock wall topped with wire. Not a place, on the whole, that I'd have cared to spend any time in. The desk clerk stood out front and gestured me towards the window as if to say take it, I don't want it, the responsibility's all yours. I was aware that, some distance behind me, one or two people had emerged and were watching to see if anything interesting was going to happen. I stepped up to the window and looked inside.

The sash was open an inch at the top, and some faint stirring of the air had caused the drapes to part down the middle. The bug screen and the darkness inside made it difficult to see anything at all, but as my eyes adjusted I began to make out shapes. Something that had at first looked like a bean bag resolved itself into a human form, slumped, halfway out of a low chair as if he'd fainted while sitting. The details weren't clear, but also in my line of sight across the room was the end of the bed with somebody lying on it. I could see a pair of soiled tennis shoes for this one, not much more.

Just drunks sleeping off a party, I thought, remembering the heavy breathing that was being picked up by the dislodged phone, and I turned to the clerk and said, 'Who's the room registered to?'

'A little s...' he began, but then he caught himself. 'A Hispanic guy. I don't think he's even one of them.'

'Well... all I see is people sleeping. I don't know what's so unusual in that.'

'For four straight days? It could have been longer. He registered weeks ago, he closed the drapes on day one and he musta sneaked the others in when no-one was watching.'

'What about the maid?'

'We're residential, maid service comes extra. She just leaves the towels and sheets outside, doesn't go in. What do you think?'

I felt a definite stirring of interest. I said, 'I think you should get your pass key so we can go inside and find out what the problem is.'

'And that's legal? I mean, I'm all square with the owner if I do what you say?'

'Get the key, all right?'

We went inside; or rather, I went inside and the little monkey in the technicolor shirt hovered in the doorway behind me. My first expectation, which was of the smell of opium smoke, turned out to be wrong; what hit me instead was a rank odor like bad breath and drains. I crossed the room and opened the window as wide as it would go, and then I turned to look at the place in the harsh angles of daylight.

Nobody had moved. There were three of them. Slumped in the low chair opposite the window was a man in a grey business suit, an expensive-looking summer lightweight with the pants stained dark where his bladder had let go. He was the one who'd fallen against the phone and dislodged the receiver, as if he'd been propped awkwardly and hadn't stayed that way. The soiled tennis shoes on the bed belonged to a short, muscular-looking man in his late thirties, while over in the other chair by the key-operated TV sprawled a black teenager in a leather jacket.

All three of them were inert, like corpses; but I checked for a pulse on each one, and they were all alive and steady. The arms of the man on the bed, who was wearing a T-shirt, showed no fresh needle marks or even old scars.

I said to the clerk, 'Did you move anything when you came in before?'

His face was that of an animal that had just been stunned prior to slaughtering. Perhaps he thought I'd read his mind; he probably didn't realise that he'd already given himself away.

'No,' he finally managed. 'I didn't move a thing.'

You can find Valley of Lights for the Kindle right here.

The Top Suspense Group

Exciting stuff - I've been invited to join the bunch of fellow-writers who have founded the groundbreaking Top Suspense Group. It's an online resource for readers in the fast-expanding eBook market.

To mark my debut with the gang I'm launching the Kindle version of my novel Valley of Lights at the rock-bottom Amazon price of 99c, for one month only.

When Phoenix Police Sergeant Alex Volchak discovers the true nature of a predator that has survived among us unnoticed for generations, he puts himself and those around him in mortal danger. "An excellent thriller... a cracking pace... large helpings of deadpan gallows humour... a genuine ability to create a sense of evil." Evening Times "The best fusion of crime and horror since Hjortsberg's Falling Angel." Time Out

This is a significant development, I think. As readers we look for some kind of filtering and guidance to help us seek out the kind of books we might like, and in this brave new world there's not a lot of it around.

From the group's initial press release:

The e-book market is exploding. With over 700,000 e-books currently available and hundreds more added every week, it’s growing increasingly difficult to distinguish quality books from those that are unedited and written by inexperienced authors.

That’s why nine established, professional authors have formed Top Suspense Group, a site where readers are guaranteed to find top-notch, award-winning authors in multiple genres who deliver a great e-reading experience in their dozens of highly-acclaimed books.

"Readers can count on us," acclaimed author Max Allan Collins explains. "Every member of our group has already made his or her mark on genre fiction, whether it's noir, crime, mystery, thriller, horror or Westerns, and in some cases, several of these genres."

Top Suspense authors have each:

* Published multiple novels with traditional publishers
* Won or have been nominated for major literary awards
* Been internationally published
* Received critical acclaim from national publications

The original lineup includes Max Allan Collins, Bill Crider, Lee Goldberg, Joel Goldman, Ed Gorman, Vicki Hendricks, Paul Levine, Harry Shannon, and Dave Zeltserman. They're joined by Naomi Hirahara, Libby Fischer Hellmann, and me.

All of us appear in the group's first anthology of short fiction - call it a taster, if you like - about which, more below.

Chiller

Thanks to friend-of-the-blog Stan for the news that Network DVD will release the complete Chiller anthology series on February 28th.

Produced and in part directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, we kicked off the series with an adaptation of Peter James' Prophecy and pulled in, as I recall, somewhere in excess of 11 million viewers. A number that ITV went on to squander by pre-empting later shows for sports fixtures.

Some of the stories were available on VHS back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, but as far as I'm aware this is a first UK DVD release. A couple of years ago I got hold of a copy of an Australian set, and that's the only DVD version I was aware of until now. I'm not sure if I checked out the transfer quality on that one - the shrinkwrap's off the box but I can be funny about viewing my old stuff. All I ever seem to see are things I want to fix.

The one that puzzles me by its absence from the shelves is Murder Rooms, which was shot in lovely widescreen Super 16 and released in the UK as individual shows in a piss-poor 4X3 transfer that mostly seemed to sell in Past Times shops, between the Celtic teatowels and candlestick holders. In case you didn't see it, Murder Rooms featured period mysteries involving the young Arthur Conan Doyle and his real-life mentor Joseph Bell, in stories that interwove fictional sleuthing, biographical points, and echoes of the Holmesian canon. Made to a high standard by BBC Films, it was a fresh take on a popular subject and the episode I contributed is one of my favourite pieces of work. A second season was planned, but cancelled before the commissions went through. I found it an inexplicable decision until I read that the word around the BBC was that it had been 'too successful for the wrong department'. In its place, BBC Drama made yet another Hound of the Baskervilles.

The US Murder Rooms complete set is widescreen but still not looking as good as it ought to; Amazon has a Swedish 'complete season' issue listed but at 65 quid, I'll stifle my curiosity over how that one looks.

Christmas, and a plug for my Kindle stuff

I reckon I must have had a happy childhood because most of my Christmas gifts seem to recall it in one way or another. I'm kinda shameless in the hints I drop but at least it makes me easy to buy for. How else could anyone know that my old Corgi Batmobile needed a nice repro box and liner? (Seven quid, handmade, from Twentieth Century Box UK. Lovely work, and there's no way this guy can be making any money out of it.)

If you're puzzling over a shiny new Kindle today and looking for something to download onto it, let me remind you with an equal lack of shame that I have mucho stuff online now - click here for the UK selection or here for a US link, or just hop on Amazon and search the Kindle store with my name.

Coding Your Book for the Kindle

With more detail and clarity than I can offer you, Paul Drummond has added a page to his own website in which he lays out the process of setting up a manuscript for e-publication to a professional standard.

"Each chapter was copied from the original Word document, converted to HTML and added to the .ePub document. Unnecessary formatting was removed as all styling within an .ePub document is handled by a global style sheet. Generally, eBooks shouldn't contain much styling / presentation information. For example, the Kindle always uses the same typeface so there's no point specifying which font to use. Also, the size of the page text can be adjusted by the user so there's no reason to specify absolute type size such as '12pt'. After converting all the text from the novel we had a well structured .ePub document, ready for use on various readers and devices, or conversion to .mobi format for the Kindle. However, it still needed a cover."

See the full page of info here. And contact Paul if you want to look into the same service for your own material.

Follower is now in the Kindle store - I'll make a bit more noise about that in a week or so when I should also be announcing a Kindle edition of Out of his Mind, the short story collection that nabbed me the British Fantasy Award, along with a little pre-Christmas freebie.

Chimera at the BFI

Here's some news... on Monday July 5th as part of the Future Human season, my 1990 miniseries Chimera is getting a screening at the BFI South Bank. A while back I was asked if I'd say a few words before it, but that's now expanded to become a Q&A with me and director Lawrence Gordon Clark.

Which feels weirdly symmetrical because back when the BFI South Bank was the National Film Theatre, they screened Chimera before it was broadcast. It was part of a season of new TV drama, and we did something similar then. I could probably dig out my twenty-year-old notes, if I made any, and give the same answers. Last I heard, they were planning to show the first two parts at about 6:30pm followed by a 30 minute break, and then the final two at 8.30pm.

The day of the screening coincides with the release of the Region 2 DVD. I have some details of those DVD extra features now. There are sleeve notes from me, Lawrence, and Executive Producer Archie Tait. There's an image gallery, and the original press kit for the show, and the script of an earlier radio adaptation of the source novel. There's also an on-camera interview that I did for Revelation a couple of years back when they first started pursuing the DVD rights.

In addition to that I've recorded some commentary for behind-the-scenes footage shot during the production. It's been tricky to juggle, with me being here and the editor working on the footage at the authoring house in London, and I haven't yet seen the results. But there's a look inside the workshop of effects house Image Animation, designers and creators of the hybrid prosthetic, along with coverage of the shooting of the episode one finale and stuff from the Yorkshire locations.

Future Human runs through July and August and there's a listing of the screenings and events here. Just take a look at some of the stuff they're presenting. 2001, Chris Marker's La Jetee, BBC 2's seminal series of sf adaptations Out of the Unknown, Silent Running, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Tarkovsky's Solaris... and also in July, a programme running in parallel, Brian Clemens, Auteur of the Avengers. Seeing my little show in there makes me feel like I crashed the A-list party of my dreams.

It just struck me that I was twenty-five when I wrote the book.

I need to sit here quietly for a while and think about that.

Scares on the Shelf

Twice the Terror is a second collection of material from The Horror Zine, Jeani Rector's Sacramento-based webzine of dark-themed fiction, art and poetry.

The previous print collection, And Now the Nightmare Begins, featured a range of contributors, from the newly-launched to the likes of Ramsey Campbell, Simon Clark, and Joe R Lansdale.

I have to come clean and say that I have a dog in this fight - volume two includes my short story Not Here, Not Now.

From the book's Amazon entry:

The Horror Zine presents its second in-print anthology, a wicked brew of stories with relentless suspense that ride side-by-side with haunting poetry and eye-popping artwork. Volume 2 from The Horror Zine unveils a fresh approach to basic fears and has twisted, unexpected endings. “Twice the Terror: THE HORROR ZINE” contains contributions from such famous writers such as Graham Masterton, Bentley Little, Joe R. Lansdale, Deborah LeBlanc, Ed Gorman, Stephen Gallagher, Terence Faherty, and Hugh Fox. But it also contains deliciously dark delights from morbidly creative people who have not yet made the big time… but they will soon.

Mainstream publishing falls in and out of love with dark fiction, whereas it seems to me that the core readership's appetite remains fairly steady. Kudos to The Horror Zine for giving a platform to new writing in a context of the genre's more recent traditions.

Here are a couple of random picks from the quality artwork on the site. This one's Mercy by Isiah Stephens:


While these strange dolls are the creations of Beth Robinson.

New Work, and Some Old Places

I'm thinking of going to the Gene Autry Western museum in Griffith Park this weekend. See if there's anything that helps my ideas for the new book.

(That's the new new book; the new book, a big historical in the same vein as The Kingdom of Bones and from the same Random House imprint, is written and wrapped and I'll have a confirmed title and a publication date to give you soon)

I picked up Richard Alleman's Hollywood: The Movie Lovers' Guide earlier this week. Loads of historic Hollywood sites and addresses with the history behind each - not really for your average tourist, who probably doesn't give a crap about where DW Griffiths' Intolerance set once stood, or the house where George 'Superman' Reeves shot himself (not far from where I'm living, it seems), but engrossing for some of us. Apparently the Bob's Big Boy Restaurant that I pass every day on my way to the studio is quite historic. As these things go.

And there's a closed apartment above the carousel on Santa Monica pier that was opened up and rented out to filmmakers in the 1960s, where Curtis Harrington shot NIGHT TIDE - a little B&W indie horror movie that no one's heard of and which took me years to track down, until Stephen Laws steered me to a copy. Dennis Hopper's first lead role and a story about an off-duty sailor who falls for a sideshow performer who may or may not be a real mermaid... if you know The Boat House, you'll know why I was drawn to it.

Frequently Answered Questions

On Getting Started
I was lucky enough to start as a reader when horror was a subtle art, and just as lucky to start my career at the point where it turned into big business. So my early reading was people like HG Wells, Conan Doyle, Joseph Payne Brennan, and all those marvellous Pan Books of Horror with their tacky head-in-a-bucket covers and some of the most incredibly well-crafted writing inside.

In the 80s it was people like Stephen King and Peter Straub who led the way for writers like me by taking horror into the mass market. Although I think that Ira Levin was there ahead of them with Rosemary's Baby, and John Farris with The Fury. Along with Thomas Tryon's Harvest Home they'd be my main candidates for the founders of the cycle that played itself out at the end of the 90s – I think horror's back to being a subtle art again, in written form at least.

On Breaking In
Whatever it is you want to do, chuck yourself at it at whatever level. I was getting my stories rejected from The Wizard when I was nine. If you write fiction, try the small presses. If you want to do something for the screen, get together and make something with friends. At that stage energy matters more than accomplishment – do stuff for the fun of doing it and don't try to ape big-time professionalism with tiny resources, which was one of my early mistakes.

In the case of film, read lots about the industry. And I mean lots, everything from the silents to Weta Workshop. Don't be one of those people who thinks that film history began with George Lucas. Then when it comes to looking for actual work within the industry, have specific goals – set out to be a runner, or an editor's assistant, or whatever. You aren't going to direct or land screenplay work until you've proven yourself, so make a calculated bid for a specific point of entry. And when somebody asks you what in the business you want to do, don't say "Anything" – there's no such job as an Anything.

Eyes Without a Face

On that trip to Paris a couple of weeks back I gave myself an excuse to browse the stock of the Bouquinistes, those riverside bookstalls along the Seine, for a copy of the source novel of one of my favourite films. All I knew of Les Yeux Sans Visage was that it was written by Jean Redon, and that when it's spoken of at all it tends to be dismissed as lurid trash fiction.

Which would hardly matter to me, as I don't read French fluently... I can blunder through a text with a dictionary to hand, but that's as far as it goes. And since much of the literature that I loved when I was growing up was also considered to be trash fiction, that wouldn't deter me either. Georges Franju's film based on the novel reads, in synopsis, like a low-grade shocker; on the screen it's a thing of memorable, terrible beauty.

And you know how it is. I just like looking for books. The browsing was the point. Were I to find a copy, it would have been more for souvenir purposes than for reading. I didn't even hold out much hope - all the evidence pointed to rarity.

According to some sources, Redon was supposedly one of the noms de plume of prolific fictioneer Frédéric Dard, but that appears to be a misconception springing from Dard's contribution of a back-cover quote for the paperback. In it, he describes Redon as a former journalist, film publicist, screenwriter and now debut novelist. Perhaps someone once misread a bibliographical note and that's where the misattribution began.

When I raised this on a newsgroup, Remy Lechevalier told me:

"The story, as I was always told it, was that Redon sold his first novel Les Yeux Sans Visage to Fleuve Noir for their 'Angoisse' collection of fantasy/horror novels. At the same time, he had written a movie treatment of the novel ; both were accepted at about the same time and publisher and producer worked together on how to coordinate. The book was postponed by a couple of months and a picture from the movie then hastily slapped on the cover. But it was not meant initially as a true movie tie-in. The book was written first."

I didn't find the book. But I'd stoked my own curiosity to the point where I checked out French eBay when I got home, and got a nice copy there for a reasonable bid - that 1959 Fleuve Noir first edition tie-in with images from Franju's film on the jacket.

Was the novel was ever translated into English? I'm guessing probably not, as it doesn't even appear to have stayed in print in France. Googling just brings up hits for the movie.

(which was co-scripted by the Boileau/Narcejac writing team, they whose twisty tales of suspense inspired Hitchcock's Vertigo and Clouzot's Les Diaboliques - I've English translations of a number of their novels, which are faithful but read like language exam exercises, and make me wonder if, someday in my Copious Spare Time, I might be able to make a better fist of an English Les Yeux)

And here's a trivia point. In the first version of Eleventh Hour I based the character of Lita Valentine, the woman who procures vulnerable host mothers for cloning technician Sidney Hayward, on Alida Valli's Louise, who performs a similar function for the ruthless and driven Dr Génessier in Les Yeux.

Having now seen the US pilot, it seems that Davis, Cannon & co must have been reading the vibes and channelling more than the script. The IMDB doesn't list the actress yet and my copy didn't have credits, but when I find out her name I'll let you know.

Valley of Lights

Once again, a question in the comments spawns a post... Stan, people are gonna start talking.

The true answer to the question (about which of my novels I'd most like to see adapted) is The Spirit Box, for reasons I'll go into another time, but for now here's an extract from my afterword to the Telos Classics edition of Valley of Lights, preceded by a spot of scene-setting:

A routine call to a sleazy Phoenix hotel throws police sergeant Alex Volchak into a world where the brain-dead check themselves out of hospital, and a stranger can seem to know the most intimate details of his life. Like his feelings for Loretta, the neighbour who's more than a friend, and her daughter Georgina, so much the child he never had. Volchak finds himself on the hunt for a child killer, someone who can apparently switch bodies with ease, and who is playing games with the police. And then Georgina is taken.

Although I was a Granada employee for five years, I never freelanced for the company until the commissioning of Dark Matter (as Eleventh Hour was initially called). They took an interest in my writing while I was there, though. I worked in the Presentation Department as an Assistant Transmission Controller, which basically meant I did the hands-on cut/wipe/fade business involved in getting all the day's scheduled material onto the air. There was some office prep involved but most of our time was spent in a windowless control room in the bowels of the Quay Street building, where we lived like moles.

Every now and again I'd get a call inviting me to a meeting... not a pitch meeting, just a get-to-know to find out what this bloke in the cellar was up to. One such call was from Gerry Hagan, head of the Script Department. As a result of it he put me in touch with Stuart Orme, a TV director on the lookout for film projects. There was no real Granada angle to this; it was just the kind of thing that Gerry was known for.

Stuart has since gained a profile as a director of high-end British TV (he directed The Sculptress and the recent adaptation of The Lost World) but back then he was making a mark in the newly-burgeoning music video business and looking for a feature. Our first attempt at getting one off the ground was an adaptation of my second novel, Follower, the story of a man stalked by a shape-changer from Norse mythology with a choice of setting not a little influenced by Gavin Lyall's Blame the Dead. We got that one half-financed, but the project foundered for lack of British investment to match the Norwegian oil money we found.

I showed Valley of Lights to Stuart while it was still in manuscript. He brought in his MTV producing partners and together they optioned the material. The company was named AWGO, comprising the initials of the principals (along with Stuart there were Marcello Anciano and Martin Wyn Griffith). They had offices on Beak Street on the fringes of Soho, just around the corner from Curtis Brown where Leah Schmidt, the media half of my wizard new representation team, was busily remaking my screenwriting career.

My main memory of the AWGO building is of a shared stairway that was like something out of Graham Greene; ill-lit, peeling, decorously decaying... but then, almost every film company I've ever had dealings with has been approached by a stairway exactly like it. The uncollected mail on the stairs. The mysterious co-tenants who never appear.

I suppose the appeal of the material would have been obvious, in retrospect. It was a natural low-budget genre piece that hit all the commercial buttons and was eminently makeable, had a fantastical premise that called for no elaborate or expensive effects, and it offered a bunch of eager Brits like us an 'in' to the American filmmaking scene. I wrote the screenplay, and they sent it out. First to the big studios and then to some of the larger independents like New Line, Handmade, Cannon, The Samuel Goldwyn Company. Wherever it went, the script seemed to make a mark. By 1986 AWGO were encouraged enough to take me out to Los Angeles, from where we struck out further on a tour of Arizona locations that I documented in the diary that forms a part of this book.

It was a magical collection of moments but, in the end, the movie fell through. We'd got so close, in fact, that AWGO had begun hiring production people and was able to raise the money from Zenith to go beyond a yearly option and buy the novel's film rights outright. So I did pretty well out of it, the downside being that those rights will never revert to me - they're Zenith's property now, and always will be.

But those who'd shown most interest eventually said pass, and some of them went off and developed similar properties of their own. Will the chances of our seeing a Valley of Lights movie ever be revived? I kind of doubt it, and for one reason only, which is that it no longer has the fresh currency that it would have had were we to have made it back then. The pursuit of a body-hopping entity in a crime/horror fusion was to become a staple in films of the late '80s and '90s, and I fear we've seen enough of them. The trend began with New Line's 1987 The Hidden, in which Kyle Mclachlan's Lloyd Gallagher chases down a disembodied alien whose targets for occupation along the way include a police lieutenant.

People told me to sue. But who's to say it wasn't coincidence? And in truth, I rather enjoyed The Hidden and had little heart for kicking up a fuss about it. Since then there's been Fallen, Wes Craven's Shocker, even a body-hopping plotline in Twin Peaks...

There are times when you just need to lay down your cards and move on to the next hand.

Book into Film

Inspired by the questioner mentioned in my previous post, who wanted to know how best to scan a novel into his computer before starting to adapt it, I've dug out some thoughts that I put together for a Writers' Guild newsletter some time back. Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings series had just got under way, and provided handy examples. The pic shows Sophie Ward, who starred along with Nigel Havers in Peter James' Prophecy.

Adapting is not a matter of reformatting. Adaptation is re-imagination. When you're reading prose, the incidents may run as vividly in your head as when you're watching a movie, but don't let that mislead you into thinking that there can't be that much difference between them.

Back in 1997, Pumpkin Books published the full text of Dracula: or, the Un-Dead, the first-ever stage adaptation of Stoker's novel. Performed once-only in a bare-stage reading with the sole purpose of securing theatrical copyright protection, it was exactly the kind of cut-and-paste, prose-into-playtext version envisioned by that Guild member a full century later.

As a historical document, it's fascinating; but viewing it as drama, it's hard to disagree with Henry Irving's back-of-the-stalls opinion of "Dreadful."

It doesn't work. It doesn't play.

It doesn't offer an equivalent experience in the target medium. And that, really, is what it's all about.

True adaptation is neither for the inexperienced nor the faint-hearted. Like Richard Gordon's Sir Lancelot Spratt, you have to be ready to make a huge incision and then dive in with both hands. You have to absorb the book and try to get inside the author's thinking, trying to get a sense in your bones of what he or she was gripped by and reaching for.

In the end it comes down to two raw materials. Impulse, and image.

These were the things that came before the prose. By impulse I mean the shape, the feel of the thing. Its tone, its purpose, its play on the emotions. And by image I mean the elements through which all those vague components are externalised. Images are those things that stay in your head when you've forgotten the plot. And often they're the things that are in the author's head before the plot gets worked around them. How many times have you read an author saying something like, "I got this idea in my mind of a man walking down a dusty road with a saddle over his shoulder, and I wanted to know who he was, where he'd come from, where he was going..."

Images aren't so much pictures, as key moments. William Goldman recommends finding the five most important ones in a story and charting everything else around them. Sometimes you'll be able to take material from the book in order to do that, a lot of the time you'll find yourself inventing stuff in the spirit of the book. You need a structure that works for the screen, you need a narrative progression that can be rendered in terms of things you see and sounds you hear because, let's face it, that's what a movie is.

In recent months we've seen a couple of adaptations within our genre that are, by general agreement, as faithful to their sources as commercial celluloid is likely to get. I'm talking about the Harry Potter and the Tolkien - although I've actually heard at least one Tolkien purist griping along the lines of, "They shouldn't have been walking along like that, they should have been walking like this..."

The Potter was a pretty straightforward job, but given the size of the enterprise and the unforgiving nature of some of the judges that awaited them, I think that Jackson and his co-writing team had to be more bloody, bold and resolute than most. LOTR is as near to the page on the screen as you're likely to get; but break it down, beat by beat and moment by moment, and you can see that it isn't the page on the screen at all.

Adaptation means absorbing the author's work and then getting into the author's shoes and then doing the job anew. And all your moment-by-moment decisions have to be made in the light of the new and radically different medium that you're now serving. You can't blame the book if you go wrong. You're the captain, now.

Your assets? Cineliteracy, for one. Believe it or not, film history did not begin with George Lucas or A Nightmare on Elm Street. Conciseness, for another. The best story points are the ones that the viewers pick up without being told directly, the implications they see in some well-chosen piece of dramatic business. Some writers never get this. Few things can make a viewer lose the will to live more than a scene with two people in a room, sitting there and explaining the plot to each other.

A sense of pace won't go amiss, either. Film pacing is all about compression and omission. Goldman again: get into a scene late, get out of it early. The beauty of film narrative is that you can run parallel streams of action and, by cutting between them, maintain the illusion of real time without actually sticking to it. Get that dynamic into your head, and the 'secret' of screenwriting moves to within your reach.

And lastly, never admit to this, but a little sense of poetry does no harm either. Kong on top of the Empire State Building is not just a monkey on a roof. Claude Rains and Humphrey Bogart walking off into the fog are not just there to show you what the weather's like in Casablanca.

Adaptation is not an easy option, although I have to say that it does spare you the agony and brow-sweat of dragging something out of thin air where there was nothing before. Back in 1994 I had great fun adapting Peter James' Prophecy for Yorkshire TV. Peter had done all the work of the imagination; I took all his work on board and then applied invention to render it as film. On one level I changed everything, but it a more important sense I changed nothing at all... I was conscious of the responsibility to show you what was already there, but in a different way.

Peter still talks to me, so I must have done something right. There's another discussion to be had, about adaptations that plunder and then wilfully misrepresent their source material in order to serve someone else's creative agenda… but, what do you know? I've used up all my space.

Wendigo, Night Tide

A week or two back, Stephen Volk asked me if I'd seen "the peculiar, eerie Wendigo".

And the answer was, yes, I have. Stephen Laws had discovered it and was determined that he was going to get me to see it.

On the face of it, Larry Fessenden's modestly-budgeted indie horror reads like a standard spam-in-a-cabin scenario. House in the woods, Deliverance-style hostile locals, something lurking Out There. All of which does it a massive disservice.

I found it cheap in the local Blockbuster's ex-rental bin and after a viewing reckoned it to be thoughtful, grown-up and resonant. I love the kind of stuff that plays all the notes of weirdness without ever being unbelievable. I suppose the archetype of that kind of screen story would be Cat People - strange shit happens while you're looking the other way, and you never quite catch it happening.

Wendigo has a non-Hollywood, independent-movie feel that seriously enhances its credibility. The core family are played by indie queen Patricia Clarkson, that bloke from Medium, and the kid from Malcolm in the Middle.

(This is my Sunday. Look 'em up yourselves.)

And while we're on the subject, did you ever see Curtis Harrington's first feature, Night Tide? I'd wanted to see it for ages and finally managed to catch up with it last year.

It has a similar setup to Cat People - it features a very young Dennis Hopper as a sailor on leave in an off-season seaside resort, who falls for a woman who plays a mermaid in a sideshow. But she always holds something of herself back, and there's a sense of something more to her past. It could be a setup for a creature feature. But like Cat People, it's a naturalistic movie that presses the Creature Feature buttons.

I suppose the subtle stuff like that can't exist without the unsubtle stuff to be subtler than. If that makes any sense.

Six Tales

Stephen Laws writes:

"Completely by accident, I was looking at the TV schedules last night - and the title Spectre caught my eye (like I have exclusive rights on the word, or something).

"Turns out that it's the first of a six part Spanish series called 6 Tales to Keep You Awake - very much in the Del Toro/Spanish/ghost/horror tradition.

"I watched it this morning, and thought that it was pretty damned good. Amazing that this has been buried away in the schedules! Definitely worth a look-see; one claim to its excellence being that the creative associate involved is Narciso Ibáñez Serrador (director of the excellent Who Can Kill a Child? and, of course, creator of that other great horror - the 321 TV series)."

I saw Spectre in the listings for yesterday where it was written-up as an American TV movie with Robert Culp and Gig Young. An odd scheduling choice for BBC4, I reckoned, and never gave it another thought. The Total TV Guide compilers must have just searched on the title and cribbed the details of the wrong film!

The series looks like a mixed bag, but well worth noting. Jaume Balagueró, co-writer and director of one of the films, made his feature debut with Los Sin Nombre, a well-realised adaptation of Ramsey Campbell's novel The Nameless.

Life Line

Did you see this? I wouldn't be surprised if the answer was no. It seems to have become one of the best-kept secrets of my career.

It was a two-parter for BBC1, two hours long, and starred Ray Stevenson (Titus Pullo in Rome), Joanne Whalley (Edge of Darkness, The Singing Detective, Scandal, and many a young chap's fantasy), and Jemima Rooper (The Famous Five, As If, Hex).

It's not my job to make claims for the writing, but in the execution it was among the best-crafted of my TV stuff to date. It had some real money thrown at it, and it shows. Jamie Payne's direction was imaginative, able, and respectful of the script (qualities rare in combination!) and cameraman Mike Southon did awesome, feature-quality work at TV-shoot speed (Mike is a features/music video guy whose credits include Ken Russell's Gothic and Jodie Foster's Little Man Tate, as well as oodles of stuff for the likes of George Michael and Guns'n'Roses). Chris Farrer was the script editor and Tim Bradley produced. If you ever find yourself working with any of this gang, consider yourself blessed.

It shares the premise (a haunted chat line) of my short story of the same title, but it isn't the short story.

It started with a call from Gareth Neame, who was on a fairly urgent search for genre material. The BBC had three slots to fill and Gareth, in his capacity as the new MD of Carnival Films, was going after the commission. They were looking for contemporary fantasy singles but the possibility of further series development would sweeten any idea's chances.

What I pitched was a modern take on the Orpheus and Euridice tale, with the chat line playing a similar role to the car radio in Cocteau's Orphee - a bridge between the two worlds, echoing with enigmatic exchanges which could generate any number of further narratives if they wanted a premise for an anthology series.

To be honest I was barely interested in the series angle but if it was gonna get me through the door, fine. I'd already adapted the short - once for radio's Fear on Four and again for the unmade second series of Chillers for TV - and wasn't interested in going there again. Whereas I'd been wanting to do a modern Orpheus for yonks and had my ideas mostly worked out and ready to go.

I offered them a different title but they liked Life Line.

It changed somewhat in the making - the visual modernism takes it into a different territory than the semi-documentary settings of my imagining - but I liked the result. David Pirie, author of the landmark study Heritage of Horror, praised the show and predicted that it would get up the noses of 'the realist brigade', as I imagine it probably did.

If any of them saw it.

Everyone involved was proud of the show, right up to the exec levels within the BBC. Word came through that the schedulers were rushing it forward to an earlier slot. I thought, Wow. They must really love it.

Imagine my joy when I opened The Radio Times to see that we'd been 'rushed forward' into a slot to run against live football on ITV... a small matter of Manchester United versus A C Milan.

Wallace and Kong

A post header which sounds like it has to refer to the most ambitious Aardman stop-motion film ever...

A sequence in one of the Disc One extras on the 2005 movie boxed set shows that Peter Jackson owns a copy of the Edgar Wallace material. It's used as the prop for the script that Jack Driscoll writes on the voyage, and we get to hear a short sequence involving Captain Englehorn's misgivings read aloud.

I can't believe that the onion-skin paper being waved around and crumpled with such abandon represents the original physical pages, but it's in proper screenplay form with character names as per the final movie. It's titled Kong, echoing earlier Cooper films like Chang and Rango. Jackson's cagy about how he got hold of it, though I'm not sure why he needs to be. Maybe it's just too long a story to tell.

Here's what I've found; for me the long movie plays much better split over a couple of evenings. Of course, what you then lose is the big-screen experience, which for a spectacle movie like this is significant.

(Maybe this is the answer...)

I'll tell you what still throws me, though. In the 1933 original, Kong is an example of a lost prehistoric species. Ape-like, enormous, and sui generis. In the modern version he's an authentic-but-bizarrely-magnified Silverback Gorilla, which is... I don't know. It's less, somehow. By which I think I mean it exerts less of a grip on my imagination.

The original Kong had two distinct looks, apparently, or three if you include the 'life-sized' constructed head used only in a couple of sore-thumb closeups and displayed at the premiere. Broadly speaking there was Skull Island Kong, and Manhattan Kong. There's some interesting stuff about the construction of the models and their fate after the movie if you want to look here.

Or if you want to see something really dumb, there's this piece. It sounds like it ought to come from The Onion but it's actually a po-faced article from National Geographic: King Kong Island Home Is Pure Fantasy, Ecology Experts Say.